When an Accessible Van Gets Hit: The Challenges No One Thinks About

And my daughter was inside.

We were on the way back from horse therapy.

You know, you've seen Sydney do it.

We've talked about that a million times.

You know, my daughter, Sydney, she's 11 years old.

She's severely disabled, cerebral palsy, nonverbal, all that stuff.

we do horse therapy every week we go out to chatsworth california there's a big uh horse uh i guess you call it an arena and she goes on the horse and she rides for about 45 minutes awesome it's a great thing anyway we're on the drive back we're listening to the beatles her and i like singing in the car as we do we're stopped at a red light and then bang somebody rear ends us at about 25 30 miles an hour and it's it hit us.

It felt like a train hit us, man.

It hit us so hard.

Boom, right into the back of our wheelchair accessible van.

First, I had no idea what was going on.

I just knew it was big bang.

And then the second thing I thought in my head was, ouch, that hurt.

Third thing I thought in my head was, oh my God, I'm six to 210 pounds.

And if I'm in pain, holy shit, Sydney.

And I turn around and I look and she's stunned.

And then as soon as she's like, she's stunned.

And then deep breath and then she starts screaming and crying in pain so i then i process what's happened oh my god we just got rear-ended so then i open my door and then i see the guy he's driving a mercedes suv which is just slammed it's like now embedded in the back of our van oh god Yeah.

And by the way, this is a rear entry wheelchair accessible van, which means that the trunk of the van opens up and then the ramp goes down in the back.

So the first thing that I want to do obviously is get Sydney out of the van, but I can't because his car is in the back of my van.

So I open up my driver's side door and I get out and I see this man coming towards me and he's walking over to me and I am pumped full of adrenaline and I'm screaming at him, get the fuck away from me.

Cause he's walking towards me.

He's like, you okay? I'm like, get the fuck away from me.

Get the fuck away from my daughter.

Get the fuck away from my van.